Finding Home
by micluck
Summary: Nessie is having a bad year. An overprotective father that can read every thought in her head. Leaving the only home she's ever known to start over. In love with her best friend, who will ditch her someday for a mystical soul mate. What's a hybrid to do?
1. Hormones and Brown Sugar

**Hi all! This is my first ever attempt at fan fiction, so please be gentle with my delicate soul. Hope you enjoy!**

**I don't own anything - as if I could be that lucky.**

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><p><strong>Jacob's POV<strong>

"Something's wrong with Nessie." I didn't bother to dredge up a greeting as I walked into the cottage through the kitchen door. Edward would have heard my thoughts for the last quarter mile, so there was no need.

I'd left Nessie at the front door of the Cullens' main house. She and Rose we up to something girly for the day, and I was definitely not invited. She'd ran ahead of me when we'd reached the edge of the trees with a wave and a "see ya" tossed over her shoulder.

She _never_ touched me anymore. I missed feeling her thoughts course through me, telling me how she felt about every little thing. I used to know her mind better than she knew it herself. Until a year ago, when things had started to change. Now there was barely any touching at all – and definitely no hand-to-skin contact.

It was freaking me out. After years of her running up to me after an hours absence, giving me a play-by-play of everything I'd missed, and then just hanging out in my arms for as long as she could get away with, the new unspoken personal space rule had me anxious.

Edward's eyebrows had pulled together, following my disjointed thoughts as I ran through all the times she had actively avoided touching me.

"I haven't noticed any strange behavior. And her mind is as calm as ever. Perhaps this is just part of her development."

"That's just it! She's a teenager. She shouldn't be calm!" I turned from my erratic pacing to see him smirking at me. I collapsed onto one of the stools at the kitchen island with a sigh that bordered on a growl.

"So you want her to have mood swings and temper tantrums again?" He asked as he sat across the island from me, his voice still holding the edge of the smirk. I let my head fall onto my arms on top of the counter.

The sad thing was, I did. Just before the personal bubble from hell grew around her, she had been in full drama queen mode. She would be angry and petulant one second, joyful and childish the next, followed by heartbreaking sobs as she cried in my arms about never being normal. It was awful, but at least she'd been in my arms. This… calm? This was torture.

I felt the air move slightly around me and looked up to see Bella putting a plate of cinnamon rolls in front of me. I tried to grin up at her, but the look on her face told me it fell short. I grabbed a roll and stuffed it whole into my mouth.

"Ew, Jake. Chew please."

"Jacob, I'm not sensing anything in her mind that you need to be worried about. This is probably just a phase. Teenagers get distant."

I wanted to pump him for information, ask what she was thinking, if I'd done anything wrong, if she was upset with me. But I couldn't. If she wanted privacy, I would respect that. I would give her what she needed, no matter how much I missed her.

"Anyway, Jake, we're glad you're here. There's, uh, something else we need to discuss with you."

I looked back at Bella when she spoke and froze. There was a strange edge to her voice and she wouldn't meet my eyes. She opened her mouth to say something else, but closed it again after a few seconds when nothing came out. She shot Edward a pained expression.

Huh? What could we possible need to discuss? Edward nodded at her before turning to look at me, obviously preparing to continue where she left off.

"We've been in Forks for too long," Edwards said, his eyes focused on my face. "We're all restless. Carlisle can't work at the hospitals nearby and we have to be careful going into town. People were already beginning to wonder about us. We can't allow them to begin to suspect what we are. Renesmee is almost mature, so her accelerated growth won't pose a problem to our starting over somewhere new. The family has decided it's time to move."

_No._ Even though I knew he was listening, pulling the thought out of my head I couldn't stop repeating over and over, drowning out the last his words._ No no no. You can't._

"You _can't_ take her away from me."

The words came out so choked I wondered if he would've understood if he hadn't been in my mind as well. I felt my hands begin to shake, something they hadn't done in years, the phase bubbling right below my skin.

"No one is going to take her from you Jacob." Bella finally met my eyes as she spoke. She actually looked shocked.

"What the hell does that mean? You're leaving – how is that not taking her!" I could feel the panic rising in my chest, and her words were doing nothing to push back the burn beneath my skin. I stood up too quickly, sending the stool crashing to the ground with a crack. I tried to calm my breathing, but the gasps kept accelerating and my vision was tinting red.

Bella reached out to touch my arm, but stopped halfway there, probably deciding that a vampire's soothing touch might not be the best thing for me right now. Edward reached over and gathered her hand in his. He couldn't do this to me. I thought we had developed a... friendship of sorts. Nessie was my world, my everything, and he was just going to run away with his perfect little family and leave me to - Hell no! I would chase after them anywhere, I could follow them wherever they took her. He said something I couldn't hear through the roaring in my ears. Scowling, he tried again, louder this time.

"Jacob, stop panicking. We had always assumed you would come with us."

**Renesmee's POV**

_Damn it. Brown sugar._

I lifted my face into the wind coming from the direction of cottage I'd grown up in and let the slight fragrance of brown sugar wash over me.

He was here.

I would never, no matter how long my existence, forget the smell of Jacob Black. Brown sugar and rain and new grass and _heaven_.

I was supposed to be in Port Angeles with Rose, but after an hour at the cafe she liked I asked if she would mind skipping the movie and just going home. I hated to disappoint her, but the idea of sitting through a romantic comedy made me feel faintly ill.

I was in no shape to deal with Jacob while my father was nearby.

Hopefully Dad was too distracted by Jacob to have picked up more than my surface thoughts as I paused at the tree line a few yards from the cottage. He wouldn't be surprised by the mild annoyance at Jake's presence and the slight guilt at bailing on Rosalie, but I hoped he hadn't caught me thinking about brown sugar. Not again.

He had noticed my preoccupation with the stuff a few months ago, but thankfully he hadn't yet picked up on underlying cause. He had come back from the weekly grocery store trip that was required to keep Jake from claiming he was dying of hunger on a daily basis. The trips took longer now, as he had to drive out to Port Angeles. The family was pretending they had moved from the area and couldn't go into Forks for simple necessities anymore.

I was unpacking bag after bag as he ran them in from the car and pulled out an absolutely giant bag of brown sugar. I was staring at it as he brought in the last of the bags.

"Um, Dad? Why did you buy the world's largest bag of brown sugar?"

He looked over at me, confused by my confusion. "You've been thinking about it for the last few weeks. I assumed you just kept forgetting to ask me to pick it up."

I felt the blood drain from my face and then flood back in a flush. _Shit._

"Renesmee!" He was looking at me with his eyes narrowed, obviously not a fan of my potty, er, brain.

"Sorry dad."

I was trying desperately to keep my mind blank. Trying to come up with an excuse for bizarre behavior and thoughts while trying not to think about how you're trying to come up with an excuse… and even more – trying not to think about how opening the bag would make the whole kitchen smell a little like my best friend. Nowhere near the perfect blend of my favorite things in this world that hit me between the eyes when he was actually here, but enough to freak my extremely overprotective father out when I lost control of my thoughts. Which always happened when I was with Jake.

"I was going to bake something for the pack meeting tomorrow, but I forgot. Now… I don't have time," I finished lamely.

He'd looked at me suspiciously and I had run from the kitchen singing show tunes in my head and muttering something about Alice taking me shopping.

I shook my head to chase the memory off as I neared the house. I heard a rumble of conversation from the kitchen window and change directions mid stride, heading for the front door so I could avoid… him.

"… talk to the pack. Not sure how soon…" I only caught a few words as I walked into the house and made for my room. I only just made it when I heard a stool scraping in the kitchen. Had to be Jake, as my parents made no noise unless they wanted to. He was leaving.

I gripped the frame of my bedroom window, trying to pull myself together before Dad could turn more attention to me.

I know my father loves me, that he can't help his gifts and he doesn't actively try to invade my privacy. But there was a large part of me that was, for all intents and purposes, a teenage girl. And it was worse than him having a live feed to my diary. So I had spent the last year trying perfecting the barrier in my mind - I called it my anti-Edward device.

The hormones had hit full speed ahead a few months after my fifth birthday. I had become a screaming, crying, weapon of mass emotion almost overnight. Not a single member of my family knew how to cope. And, though I knew intellectually what was going on - several years of chemical imbalance being smashed into a few months - I was more freaked out than any of them. Except for Edward. He just about lost his mind trying to fix everything that I had a problem with. Which, to a teenage girl, meant everything.

So I would run to Jacob - my best friend, my shelter in the raging storm of hormones. He wouldn't try to fix. He let me be me, mess that I was. He had this scary ability to always be exactly what I needed.

Until the Fateful Day, which had achieved capitalized status in my mind in the rare moments I permitted myself to think about it - moments far away from my father. That was the day I realized three very important facts, of which I was completely certain. First, I was utterly and irrevocably in love with Jacob Black. Second, I was going to loose him forever someday. Because, third, he would never feel the same way about me.


	2. Fateful Days

**Thanks for the kind reviews! I hope you guys enjoy the second installment**.

**I still own nothing.**

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><p><strong>Chapter 2 – Fateful Days<strong>

**Renesmee's POV**

I've been told that most humans don't remember much from their first ten or so years of life. For me, the memories started sticking with me after the first month. I've got some blurry snatches from my first few weeks - my mother's skin sparkling in the sun, my father smiling down at me, biting Jacob a few times. Then things come into focus.

Still, some days stand out more clearly than others. Like the day my family stood against the Volturi.

And the day I realized I was in love with my best friend.

It was a few days before my sixth birthday, but with my accelerated growth I looked about 14. I had my father's bronze curls, though mine were much longer, and the fair skin and brown eyes my mother had before she'd been changed. The awkwardness of my preteen body was wearing off and I was just starting to round out in embarrassing ways.

The wolves were throwing me a birthday party, of sorts. Jake had asked how I wanted to celebrate and I had just wanted things to feel normal. So I asked for a bonfire. To my mind, there was nothing like hotdogs and junk food by an open flame to complete the teenage experience.

The pack was all gathered on the beach, fooling around in the last of the afternoon sun on a rare clear day at First Beach. I was helping Jake bring the last of the food down to the beach when I saw Embry sitting on the sand by the stack of driftwood that would be our fire once it got dark. He was stabbing at the sand by his feet with a stick, his lips pursed and eyebrows pulled together.

"Why's Embry all mopey?" I whispered at Jake, setting down a bag of buns and condiments a couple yards away from the fire.

"Tara left this morning. School starts up for her on Monday, so she won't be back up for a while."

Embry had imprinted on Tara at the beginning of the summer when she had come up from Portland in June to spend the school break with her grandmother on the reservation. From what I'd heard, he'd run into her in a back aisle at the store and just about walked through a rack of Doritos trying to get closer. I'd met her a week or so later, and hadn't seen either of them without the other the rest of the summer.

And now she was a five-hour drive away. Poor Embry.

I rested my palm against the back of Jake's hand for a second, letting him know I was going to sit with Embry for a bit. He smiled and kissed the top of my head before heading across the beach to where the others were messing around.

Jake had never really talked about the whole imprinting process. Of course I'd seen imprinted couples – Sam and Emily, Jared and Kim – but it almost seemed to make him uncomfortable when it had come up with Embry. I guess I didn't blame him. The idea that someday he would fall compulsively in love with a total stranger freaked me out, too. Well, if I was being honest with myself, it made me jealous.

I'd seen the way Embry looked at Tara. It was like she had instantly become the center of his universe. Everyone else disappeared when she was around. One day, that would happen to Jake.

"Hey, Embry," I said, sitting on the sand next to him. He looked up from the gouges he'd drawn as I flicked some sand at him. "It's my birthday, so you have to pretend to be happy."

He gave me a small, real smile before pasting on a gruesome looking fake grin.

"Hhhuppy Birfday!" he lisped, sounding just like the mouse from Cinderella, and I laughed, flicking more sand at him. This time, the real smile stayed.

"Sorry I'm pulling the fun out of the air."

"Nah, don't worry about it. It sucks you and Tara had to say goodbye. I know you two were really… close." That was totally the wrong word for it, but I didn't really have any way to describe the way he was… tied to her.

And suddenly, I was desperate to understand.

"What's it like?" I asked, scooting closer and grabbing my own stick to stab the ground with, so I didn't have to meet his eyes. "Imprinting, I mean."

He looked at me for a moment, and then at the rest of the pack across the beach, like he was trying to decide whether or not to answer. Then his face started changing, almost lighting up from the inside.

"It's like I didn't know that I didn't really feel alive until I met her. Like the world was a little fuzzy and then everything came clear cuz she was there."

I tried to swallow around my suddenly dry throat. He kept talking about air and gravity, but I didn't really hear much. I was picturing Jake's face, lit by the same internal glow as he talked about some girl he'd just met. I felt a little sick.

Sudden shouts and laughter distracted me from the traumatic drama playing in my head and Embry and I both looked up to see what was going on.

Seth had Jake by the head while Quil managed to get a good enough grip on his legs to pull him off his feet. It was amazing they managed to keep hold with him writhing and kicking as they ran across the sand toward the water. They only got in one swing before launching him out into the water.

He was under for a few seconds while they stood in the sand and laughed, Seth holding his hand up for a high five. Quil reached up, but instead of slapping Seth's hand, gripped him by the back of the neck and launched him out into the waves, where he crashed into a sputtering Jacob. Both went under again and Quil turned and bolted for the woods.

Jake was on his feet again by the time he made the trees.

"Idiot!" he shouted, "We have all the food – you're gonna have to come back eventually!"

He smirked after the fleeing wolf and grabbed the back of his t-shirt collar, yanking the dripping shirt up over his head. Gripping it in two hands, he began to wring out the seawater as he sloshed back toward the beach.

In that moment, it was as if something went _ping_ in my brain, like a spring under pressure finally being released.

In a fuzzy corner of my mind I recognized that my mouth was hanging slightly open and my breath had sped up. But most of my consciousness was absorbed in the path the streams of water were taking from the fall of hair in his face, over the muscular curve of his shoulder and down his chest.

I'd seen his bare chest hundreds of times. The guy was practically allergic to shirts. But it had never hit me like this before. Like a kick to the stomach.

_Oh dear god, his stomach. _

My eyes drifted down the dips and curves of muscle covered with tan skin and sparkling water. His ragged sweats hung low on his slim hips from the weight of the water.

What on earth was happening to me? I felt a little lightheaded and my stomach was starting to ache in a strange way.

I was distracted from the odd sensations coursing through me as Jake gave Seth another shove, sending him flying back into the surf. He turned toward where Embry and I were sitting, laughing as he shook some of the water out of his hair. He reached up and ran the still damp shirt over his face and head.

The tip of my tongue touched the corner of my top lip and I could taste the salt of the air blowing off the sea. I wondered how Jake's skin would taste, salty from the ocean water.

_Holy crow, I just fantasized about licking my best friend._

A hand came up into my line of sight and snapped its fingers.

"Huh?" I blinked a few times and looked back at Embry, who was staring at me like I had drool dripping down my chin._ Oh shit, did I?_

I reached up and tried to surreptitiously wipe at my mouth. No drool, thank god.

"Where'd you go there, Ness?" Embry asked as he reached out and rumpled my hair.

"Spaced out…" I mumbled, through the curls as they settled over my face. I could feel the flush heating my cheeks and debated just leaving them there.

A gust of sea air laced with brown sugar was my only warning before a pair of warm arms circled my waist and pulled me back against a very damp, exceptionally drool worthy chest.

"I like the _Cousin It_ look on you, Ness," He said, resting his chin on the top of my head.

How many times had we sat just like this? His arms around me had always felt like the most natural thing in the world. But now I was having trouble breathing through the ache in the pit of my stomach. I was awkward and stiff – nothing about this felt natural.

Jake's hands came up, pulling my hair back out of my face before dropping down, intending to link his fingers with mine.

_Oh, hell, my hands!_

I pulled away quickly, locking my hands together in my lap. If he got his palm against mine my thoughts would explode through his head and I was pretty sure that meant death by embarrassment.

"Fire!" The word came out of my throat a little strangled and they both looked at me like I was nuts.

"Let's light the fire!" I said, sounding a little too bright even to my own ears. I jumped to my feet and started digging through the bags of food looking for matches.

"Uh, Ness?"

I squeaked, turning around to find Jake right behind me with a sliver lighter in his hand.

"Cool! You light – I'll get the others!" I took of across the beach, leaving Jake behind with a shocked expression on his face.

"What the hell was that about?" I heard him mutter to himself.

I managed to keep a bright smile on my face for the next half-hour as we set the food up and started the hotdogs roasting over the fire. Jake was still looking at me funny, too distracted to even terrorize Quil when he came slinking back at the smell of food cooking.

I was squirting some ketchup on my hotdog when I saw him grab Embry and pull him back a couple yards away from the fire. I crept as close as I dared, managing to catch some of Jake's whisper.

"… all weird. What the hell were you talking about?"

"She wanted to know about imprinting," Embry answered, leaning back at Jake's growl.

They were obviously trying to be quiet, but between my enhanced hearing and all-consuming concentration I managed to pick up their words.

"She just asked what it was like. I only talked about Tara, dude, I swear." Embry almost looked scared as he backed as far away as Jake's grip on him would allow. Jake dropped his arm and I darted back to the fire before he could turn around.

I was still trying to slow my heart when he dropped onto the sand next to me.

"Everything okay?" He asked, snatching the hotdog off my plate and eating half of it in one bite.

Okay? I turned on a bright smile and nodded, grabbing some chips off my plate and shoving them in my mouth so I wouldn't have to talk.

How could things possibly be okay? How could they ever be okay again? I had to concentrate to keep my eyes from straying down to his bare chest – honestly did he _ever _wear a shirt? – and he wanted to know if I was okay? I was epically NOT OKAY.

I knew what this feeling was. Even if I'd never felt it myself, I'd seen in portrayed in dozens of movies. This was the part where the girl has her epiphany and realized the boy in front of her was everything she had ever wanted.

I was in love with him.

But he was waiting for someone else. Someone that would be his focus or his air or… what was the word Embry used?

Gravity.

How could I ever compete with gravity?


End file.
